I’ll have to admit that during the previous week or so, I haven’t been able to exclusively use FreeBSD at home or Linux as a workstation in the office. Kayla and I have still been using Kubuntu (now with improved PulseAudio support) on the basement machine, and that’s been working quite well for both Netflix and media files stored over NFS. Even Dragon Player, the default KDE association for .avi and .mkv files, is quite reasonable for lightweight playback and has given us no issues.
It’s a combination of things that have contributed to my slide back to Windows/OS X. First has been time at the office. When there are several urgent projects, it’s significantly easier to use the tools and infrastructure that are already set up on a Windows partition by virtue of Group Policy or already-existing tools. Wasting several hours because you can’t access a DFS share that would take one click from Outlook on Windows is unproductive.
What’s more, my choice of Arch Linux meant that there were several “rough around the edges” spots where I was missing packages or things just weren’t as polished as something like Fedora or Ubuntu. Font smoothing, for example, wasn’t quite what I was expecting and replacing/editing complicated XML files was going to be very frustrating. Arch seems very powerful and customizable, but that’s not something I can justify when there is a corporate-provided Ubuntu image available for install at the office.
FreeBSD has been fairly standard, to say the least. It supports the usual assortment of desktop applications, but the missing 20% of things that I do under Windows start to really show after a few weeks. My large Steam library sitting on another drive becomes almost worthless, and tasks such as scanning a document are also painful – Brother, for example, does a great job of shipping OS X and Linux (.deb and .rpm-enclosed) drivers but when it comes down to just needing a PDF, it’s way easier to grab the nearest Windows laptop and get things done.
What am I going to try next? After some review, I will be installing PC-BSDÂ 9.1 (based on FreeBSD) and seeing if there’s a more polished experience available out of the box. I’m also going to be reviewing and polishing some of my GitHub-hosted scripts for BSD compatibility.
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